The compact star US 708 hasn't had an easy life. Paired with a domineering partner, 708's mass was siphoned away, reducing it to a dense, helium-filled core.

In nearby galaxy M82, a star is exploding ... and you can see it! M82 is actually filled with stars being created and dying. Trace reports on this exploding news and tells you everything you want to know about supernovas.

But 708 didn't go quietly into the night. Instead, scientists believe the feeding frenzy ended in a supernova explosion that catapulted the ravaged remains with such force it's leaving the galaxy. Fast.

A new study shows that the star, classified as a hot subdwarf, is blasting through the Milky Way at about 750 miles per second, faster than any other star in the galaxy.

It's also the only one of about 20 similar runaways slingshot away by a supernova explosion, research published in this week's Science shows.

The other stars traveling fast enough to leave the Milky Way's gravitational fist are believed to have been booted by the supermassive black hole lurking in the center of the galaxy.

Comment: There is no specific evidence that traces trajectories back to a central black hole, but, to date, there are no other explanations for a mechanism that would impart so much kinetic energy onto a star. The theory is a star could slingshot out of a binary star system if the stellar duo swung close to a central black hole. The hole's gravitational tidal forces would break apart the duo's gravitational coupling. One of the pair would plunge toward the black hole. The other would fly with matching velocity in the opposite direction, away from the black hole. So far, 16 of these hypervelocity stars are known, the first detected in 2005. The single giant black hole propulsion theory is supported by observations that show the stars seem spaced sequentially, like a series of fired cannonballs. It is speculated that a sun like ours, under these conditions, would carry its planetary system with it.

As everyone who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area knows, the Earth moves under our feet. But what about the stresses that cause earthquakes? How much is known about them? Until now, our understanding of these stresses has been based on macroscopic approximations.

Now, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is reporting the successful study of stress fields along the San Andreas fault at the microscopic scale, the scale at which earthquake-triggering stresses originate.

Working with a powerful microfocused X-ray beam at Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source (ALS), a DOE Office of Science User Facility, researchers applied Laue X-ray microdiffraction, a technique commonly used to map stresses in electronic chips and other microscopic materials, to study a rock sample extracted from the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth (SAFOD). The results could one day lead to a better understanding of earthquake events.

"Stresses released during an earthquake are related to the strength of rocks and thus in turn to the rupture mechanism," says Martin Kunz, a beamline scientist with the ALS's Experimental Systems Group.

"We found that the distribution of stresses in our sample were very heterogeneous at the micron scale and much higher than what has been reported with macroscopic approximations. This suggests there are different processes at work at the microscopic and macroscopic scales."

Kunz is one of the co-authors of a paper describing this research in the journal Geology. The paper is titled "Residual stress preserved in quartz from the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth." Co-authors are Kai Chen, Nobumichi Tamura and Hans-Rudolf Wenk.

Most earthquakes occur when stress that builds up in rocks along active faults, such as the San Andreas, is suddenly released, sending out seismic waves that make the ground shake. The pent- up stress results from the friction caused by tectonic forces that push two plates of rock against one another.

Comment: It is possible that some some earthquakes could be caused by meteorites breaking up in the atmosphere. Read Earth Changes and the Human-Cosmic Connection by Pierre Lescaudron and Laura Knight-Jadczyk for more details.

Mars was once a small, wet and blue world, but over the past 4 billion years, Mars dried up and became the red dust bowl we know today.

But how much water did Mars possess? According to research published in the journal Science, the Martian northern hemisphere was likely covered in an ocean, covering a region of the approximate area as Earth's Atlantic Ocean, plunging, in some places, to 1.6 kilometers (1 mile) deep.

"Our study provides a solid estimate of how much water Mars once had, by determining how much water was lost to space," said Geronimo Villanueva, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the new paper, in an ESO news release. "With this work, we can better understand the history of water on Mars."

Over a 6-year period, Villanueva and his team used the ESO's Very Large Telescope (in Chile) and instruments at the W. M. Keck Observatory and the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility (both on Mauna Kea in Hawaii) to study the distribution of water molecules in the Martian atmosphere. By building a comprehensive map of water distribution and seasonal changes, they were able to arrive at this startling conclusion.

Older brains may be more similar to younger brains than previously thought.

In a new paper published in Human Brain Mapping, BBSRC-funded researchers at the University of Cambridge and Medical Research Council's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit demonstrate that previously reported changes in the aging brain using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) may be due to vascular (or blood vessels) changes, rather than changes in neuronal activity itself.

Given the large number of fMRI studies used to assess the aging brain, this has important consequences for understanding how the brain changes with age and challenges current theories of aging.

A fundamental problem of fMRI is that it measures neural activity indirectly through changes in regional blood flow. Thus, without careful correction for age differences in vasculature reactivity, differences in fMRI signals can be erroneously regarded as neuronal differences.

For only the second time, an exoplanet living with an expansive family of four stars has been revealed.

The exoplanet, which is a huge gaseous world 10 times the mass of Jupiter, was previously known to occupy a 3-star system, but a fourth star (a red dwarf) has now been found, revealing quadruple star systems possessing planets are more common than we thought.

"About four percent of solar-type stars are in quadruple systems, which is up from previous estimates because observational techniques are steadily improving," said co-author Andrei Tokovinin of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.

The whole 4-star family is collectively known as 30 Ari, located some 136 light-years from Earth — in our interstellar backyard. The exoplanet orbits the primary star of the system once every 335 days. The primary star has a new-found binary partner (which the exoplanet does not orbit) and this pair are locked in an orbital dance with a secondary binary, separated by a distance of 1,670 astronomical unit (AU), where 1 AU is the average distance between the Earth and sun.

Comment: Based on data from NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory, it's estimated that over 80% of all stars may be either binary or multiple-star systems. If our own solar system was part of such a binary star system, it could account for many of the 'anomalies' exhibited by the conventional single-star hypothesis. And it's possible that our own sun has a 'dark companion' - Nemesis.

Old female killer whales use their ecological wisdom to help their families through tough times, a new study has found.

The research by Dr Lauren Brent from the University of Exeter's Centre for Research in Animal Behaviour and colleagues from both the United Kingdom and United States, also sheds new light on the role of menopause in human populations.

"Biologically-speaking, menopause is bizarre," Dr Brent explains, adding that most animals die around the same time they stop reproducing.

"Killer whales (Orcinus orca) are one of just three species - alongside humans and short-finned pilot whales (Globicephala macrorhynchus) - where females continue to live for many years after giving birth to their last baby. Female killer whales stop reproducing in their 30s-40s, but can survive into their 90s."

Males, however, rarely live beyond 50.

It was believed that the benefit of menopause to both human and killer whale mothers lies in spreading their genes, which they do by helping their relatives survive and reproduce. But just how older females help their relatives was a mystery.

"One idea is that wisdom accumulates with age and that old females store vital information about the environment, which they share with their relatives to help them during environmental hardships," Brent says.

The researchers analysed more than 750 hours of video footage of resident killer whale family groups, whose relatedness and family history have been studied since 1976 in the coastal waters of British Columbia and Washington. In resident killer whales, family groups don't disperse, although males leave temporarily to breed with females from other populations.

They found that females who are past the age of last reproduction are more likely to lead their families as they travel around foraging grounds, compared with adult males, especially in years when Chinook salmon, their main food resource, is in short supply.

Males in the population were more likely to follow the experienced females than females. This supports other research showing that sons in a family group have a higher probability of dying following the death of their post-reproductively aged mother - and therefore have more to gain from her wisdom.

"These findings suggest that menopausal females may boost the survival of their relatives through the transfer of ecological knowledge, which may help explain why female killer whales continue to live long after they have stopped reproducing," Brent says.

You've heard that no two snowflakes are alike, but it gets even more complicated: The two sides of the same snowflake aren't even alike. Now, researchers using a cutting-edge 3D camera are able to use these imperfections to update estimates of road slickness and other storm impacts, improving winter weather warnings in real time and saving lives.

VIDEO: In the late 1800's, Wilson Bentley and Gustav Hellmann began photographing snowflakes. However each of their photos revealed entirely different representations of snowflakes. How could nature present two different forms of snowflakes? Today, University of Utah engineer Cale Fallgatter and atmospheric scientist Tim Garrett are helping to solve that mystery with the use of a new camera system that photographs free-falling snowflakes.

The popular myth that snowflakes are symmetrical originated with Wilson Bentley in 1885. Only 20 years old, Bentley came up with the idea to connect a microscope and a camera to photograph the ice crystals of snowflakes. Those photos showed symmetrical snowflakes, but the technique was imprecise.

Images from a December 2013 observation of the comet C/2013 R1 (Lovejoy) reveal clear details about rapidly changing activity in that comet's plasma tail. To get this image, astronomers used Subaru Telescope's wide-field prime-focus Suprime-Cam to zero in on 0.8 million kilometers of the comet's plasma tail, which resulted in gaining precious knowledge regarding the extreme activity in that tail as the comet neared the Sun. Their results are reported this week in a paper in the March 2015 edition of the Astronomical Journal.

Team of researchers from National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Stony Brook University (The State University of New York) and Tsuru University reported highly resolved find details of this comet captured in B-band in 2013 (Subaru Telescope's Image Captures the Intricacy of Comet Lovejoy's Tail). They used I-band filter which includes H2O+ line emissions and the V-band filter which includes CO+ and H2O+ line emissions. During the observations, the comet exhibited very rapid changes in its tail in the course of only 20 minutes (Figure 1). Such extreme short-term changes are the result of the comet's interactions with the solar wind, which consists of charged particles constantly sweeping out from the Sun. The reason for the rapidity of these changes is not well understood.

Dr. Jin Koda, the principal investigator of these nights, says "My research is on galaxies and cosmology, so I rarely observe comets. But Lovejoy was up in the sky after my targets were gone on our observing nights, and we started taking images for educational and outreach purposes. The single image from the previous night revealed such delicate details along the tail it inspired us further to take a series of images on the following night. As we analyzed the images, we realized that the tail was displaying rapid motion in a matter of only a few minutes! It was just incredible!"

Comment: Mainstream science still clings to its original conceptions about comets, despite increasing evidence coming in from Rosetta (see comment above) and other sources that indicate comets and other such bodies are 'electrical' in nature.

Scientists have taken the first ever extensive microscopy images of ultra-small bacteria, which are so far thought to be the smallest life forms in existence.

The bacteria have an average volume of 0.009 cubic microns (a micron is one millionth of a meter), 150,000 of which could be placed on the tip of a human hair.

Ultra-small bacteria's presence has been under debate for some twenty years, but until now they lacked a comprehensive electron microscopy and DNA-based description.

The research was carried out by a group of scientists from the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley, and was published in the February 27 edition of the journal Nature Communications.

"These newly described ultra-small bacteria are an example of a subset of the microbial life on earth that we know almost nothing about," said the co-corresponding author of the research, Jill Banfield, a senior faculty scientist in the earth sciences division of Berkeley Lab.

Comment: This discovery makes one wonder - are there other planets that house these ultra-small organisms? There might not be such a slim chance of life on other planets as we are led to believe.